jueves, 23 de febrero de 2017

Several commentators, among them Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute and Edward Luttwak of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have suggested that
U.S. President Donald Trump should take any efforts to warm relations
with Russia one step further and try to enlist Moscow’s help in
balancing a rising China. Trump views China
and Islamist extremism as the two principal challenges to U.S.
security, and he sees Russia as a potential partner in combating both.
The thinking goes, then, that Trump should run a version of the
diplomatic play that former U.S. President Richard Nixon and National
Security Adviser Henry Kissinger followed in the early 1970s when they
thawed relations with Beijing to counter the Soviet Union. This time,
however, Trump would partner with Russia to balance China.

The proposal entices with visions of ambitious strategic gambits across Eurasia, in Trumpian vernacular the “big league”
of geopolitics. Nixon going to China was one of the most consequential
diplomatic deals in U.S. history. What better way for the dealmaker in
chief—especially one who regularly consults with Kissinger—to burnish
his credentials than carrying out a version of it for himself? In
theory, the move would adhere to traditional maxims of geopolitics:
namely, the imperative to maintain the balance of power on the Eurasian
continent. U.S. strategists have relied on this principle to varying
degrees since at least World War II. Further, a strategy that engages
with Russia to counter China might lend a degree of coherence to the
Trump administration’s otherwise disjointed foreign policy.

ALLIED ENOUGH

The
problem for Trump is that Sino-Russian ties have been improving more or
less steadily since the waning years of the Cold War. The thaw between
the two communist powers began in the early 1980s and was followed by
normalized relations in May 1989. Beijing and Moscow established a
“strategic partnership” in 1996 and signed a Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation in 2001. Chinese and Russian leaders now refer to the relationship as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination,” a convoluted term for a not-quite alliance. Last September, Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi proclaimed that
“the depth and scope of coordination between both countries are
unprecedented.” Robust cooperation has accelerated since Xi Jinping
became China’s top leader in 2012; he reportedly has a warm personal
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The
two countries cooperate closely across a number of fields. On energy,
Russia became the top oil supplier to China in 2016. Crucially for
China, it transports supplies overland rather than through contested sea
lanes. The nations have partnered on military exercises, including in
the Mediterranean and South China Sea, as well as on some joint technology development projects. They have revived their languishing arms trade relationship. In 2015, Beijing agreed to purchase both Su-35 fighter jets and the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air
missile system from Moscow. The two countries have also embarked on a
number of symbolic people-to-people projects, such as beginning the
long-delayed construction of a bridge across the Amur River. And in June 2016, Presidents Xi and Putin agreed to work jointly to increase their control over cyberspace and communications technologies.

A
shared political vision for world order provides the foundation for
Chinese-Russian cooperation. It is defined primarily by the desire to
see an end to U.S. primacy, to be replaced by multipolarity. Once this
vision is realized, each nation would command an effective sphere of
influence in Asia and eastern Europe, respectively. For now, though,
China and Russia have tenser relations with the United States than at
any point since the end of the Cold War. This is primarily because of
maritime territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas—including
over the Diaoyu/Senkaku, the Paracel, and the Spratly island chains—and
the war in Ukraine, making the Sino-Russian partnership more important
than ever. A recent op-ed in the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily called that relationship “the ballast stone in maintaining world peace and stability.”

A shared political vision for world order provides the foundation for Chinese-Russian cooperation.

In
the 1970s, it was deep discord in the Sino-Soviet relationship that
helped convince China to align with the United States. This discord
culminated in border clashes in 1969. By 1972, relations between the two
communist powers had deteriorated from frosty to outright frozen. When
Kissinger came calling, Beijing already saw Moscow as a bigger threat
than Washington. For Russia today, the opposite is true. Moscow sees
Washington as the primary adversary despite hopes that Trump will repair
the relationship.

Moscow sees Washington as the primary adversary despite hopes that Trump will repair the relationship.

To
be sure, there is some potential for a rupture between China and
Russia. Moscow worries about a lopsided economic relationship based on
trading Russian resources for Chinese finished goods. China’s growing
influence in Central Asia and the sparsely populated areas of eastern
Russia, Moscow’s arms sales to India and Vietnam, and China’s theft of
Russian weapons designs all threaten to derail the partnership. But the
United States’ ability to fuel those disputes in order to foster
divisions remains limited at best. Moreover, Xi and Putin have found a
modus vivendi that downplays and contains those frictions while focusing
on the cooperative aspects of their relationship. When Chinese leaders
talk about a “new type of great power relations” with the United States,
they envision something much like the Sino-Russian relationship as a model.

WEAK RETURNS

In
exchange for turning against China, Moscow might seek the lifting of
sanctions imposed following the annexation of Crimea, an end to U.S.
support for a free and independent Ukraine, and acquiescence to the
regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It may also demand a removal
of missile defenses from Europe, the cessation of NATO expansion, or,
even better from a Russian perspective, the abolition of NATO
altogether. Granting Putin’s wishes on these issues would undermine the
seven-decade U.S. investment in a Europe whole, free, and at peace—an
investment that propelled the United States’ ascension to postwar
primacy in the first place. What is more, accepting Russia’s acquisition
of territory by force would undermine U.S. arguments about the
prohibition of such actions under international law when Beijing asserts
its expansive claims in the East and South China Seas using force.

Even
if Trump convinced Putin to end Moscow’s partnership with Beijing,
Russia would still have little capability to thwart China’s bad behavior
in places that matter. Russia’s Pacific Fleet, although relatively
sizable in number, suffers from severe shortfalls in maintenance, and
many of its assets are aging. Planned additions to the fleet—including
extra missile defense systems and submarines—will bolster deterrence
capabilities but have limited applicability to the types of sea patrol
tasks necessary to counter China’s maritime assertiveness. In theory,
Moscow could help arm Asian nations to contribute to the balancing
effort, but direct U.S. and other allied assistance could easily
substitute for that, building relationships more advantageous to U.S.
interests in the process.

Putin
would also need to patch up diplomatic relations in Asia if he planned
to balance against Beijing. Doing so would require a substantial
diplomatic investment and, likely, Russian concessions. Putin’s
ballyhooed rapprochement with Tokyo seems to have run aground despite
clear eagerness on the part of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a
deal to address the dispute over the Northern Territories islands, which
Russia calls the Southern Kurils, as well as a peace treaty officially
concluding World War II. And Russia’s continued support of North Korea
and staunch opposition to the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
missile defense system has made for rocky relations with Seoul. The
Russian position on the South China Sea—studied aloofness while agreeing
to joint naval exercises with China—means that strategic relations in
Southeast Asia would also require substantial diplomatic spadework
(Putin’s warm relations with President Rodrigo Duterte in the
Philippines notwithstanding).

FINDING LEVERAGE

A
better U.S. strategy for competing effectively in the no-holds-barred
contest of great power politics—including in “triangular diplomacy” with
Moscow and Beijing—would focus on two lines of effort. First, the Trump
administration should work with both Russia and China where possible.
Those efforts should seek to forge a trilateral understanding on
contentious issues affecting strategic stability, such as nuclear and
missile defense issues, twenty-first-century definitions of sovereignty,
and rules for armed intervention. Trilateral discussions should also
build practical cooperation on areas of mutual interest, such as climate
and energy, counterterrorism, and nonproliferation. Addressing
frictions head-on and building habits of cooperation could mitigate
strategic distrust among the three great powers by lessening the worry
that two will cut deals at the expense of the other.

Second,
Washington must continue to do the hard work of maintaining and
building support among current U.S. allies and partners in both Europe
and Asia, along with other increasingly powerful middle-tier states such
as Brazil, India, and Vietnam. Such ties give the United States
leverage over China and Russia, neither of which has similar worldwide
networks of friendly states. The United States must assess the costs and
benefits of finding and keeping friends overseas in a manner that looks
beyond the narrow transactionalism Trump espoused on the campaign
trail. Put simply, when considered in the context of a global
competition for power and influence, a vast network of allies and
partners starts to look more like an asset than a liability.

Trump seeks “good deals” with Russia. Cozying up to Putin in hopes of receiving Moscow’s help in balancing Beijing would not be one.

In it, the political
theorist (she always explicitly rejected the term “philosopher”) details the
trajectory: “antisemitism (not merely hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely
conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)” are considered in their interrelation.
Against the necessary background of imperialism, “antisemitism became the
catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement … then for a world
war of unparalleled ferocity and, finally, for the emergence of the
unprecedented crime of genocide”. That much is well established; the chill is
in the detail.

When she describes the rise
of the dictator, which requires a mass not a mob, you could be reading a
sociologist’s thesis about Trump supporters. “The term masses applies only
where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference,
or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organisation based
on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or
professional organisations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every
country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically
indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.”

She describes, quite
brusquely, antisemitism at its incipience: “Whereas anti-Jewish sentiments were
widespread among the educated classes of Europe throughout the 19th century,
antisemitism as an ideology remained, with very few exceptions, the prerogative
of crackpots in general and the lunatic fringes in particular.” Yet however you
dismissed their mental capacity, this hardcore created the ideological
infrastructure on which a mass movement could be built. It is strikingly
reminiscent of John Naughton’s description on David Runciman’s interestingTalking Politicspodcast about the
“alt-right”: “People who belonged loosely to this side of the political system
were essentially excluded from public discourse. But it just so happened, they
didn’t go quiet. They went to the net. So, for the best part of 20 years,
a network of rightwing echo chambers has been established, upon which was built
the infrastructure of Trump’s campaign.”

Two points come out of
that. First, that we can see from the comparison that the net isn’t responsible
for everything. Antisemites found ways to keep their ideas alive and generative
without any such advantage, and with all the same forces of conservatism and
common sense ranged against them. Second, as Runciman asks, what happened to
the leftwing networks? Why don’t we have effective echo chambers? It is a
question that all of us have been asking, one way or another; there is no
shortage of radicalism on the left.

Here, Arendt brings some
liberating insight, described in precis byProfessor Griselda Pollock, an expert
in Arendt. “She talks of the creation of pan movements, these widespread ideas
that overarch national, political and ethnic elements – the two big pan
movements she talks about are bolshevism and nazism. There is a single
explanation for everything, and before the single explanation, everything else
falls away. She gives a portrait of how you produce these isolated people,
who then become susceptible to pan ideologies, which give them a place in
something. But the place they have is ultimately sacrificial; they don’t count
for anything; all that counts is the big idea.” The left, in other words, isn’t
necessarily unequal to the task of creating a pan-ideology; but anyone who
believed in pluralism or complexity would have no currency on this terrain. We
should be glad not to have been effective in this space, even if it feels like
a failure.

Arendt was born in Germany
in 1906 and was an academic until 1933, when she embarked on charity work,
securing passage to Palestine for Jewish children and teenagers. The decision
was not based on any sudden realisation of Hitler’s menace. “For goodness
sake,” she said, laughing, in a television interview in 1964, “we didn’t need
[him] to know that the Nazis were our enemies. We also knew that a large number
of Germans were behind him. That could not shock us in 1933.” Rather, she had
been alienated from the intellectual milieu by their “coordinated” exclusion of
their Jewish colleagues (Arendt came from a family of secular Jewish lefties).

“The personal problem did
not lie in what our enemies did but in what our friends did,” she said. “[They
were] not yet under the pressure of terror, [but] it was as if a vacuum formed
around one.” She conducted the refugee work from Paris. Stripped of her German
citizenship in 1937, she escaped to New York in 1941 with her husband and
mother, via the Gurs internment camp in the Vichy-held south of France.

She was never unclear about
the magnitude of the Holocaust, saying, in the same interview: “The decisive
day was when we heard about Auschwitz. Before that, we said: ‘Well, one has
enemies. That is natural. Why shouldn’t people have enemies?’ But this was
different. It was as if an abyss had opened. Amends can be made for almost
anything, at some point in politics, but not for this.”

However, she was a
controversial figure by the 1960s, following the publication ofEichmann in Jerusalem, a
consideration ofAdolf Eichmann’s trialand what it revealed about
the nature of the Final Solution and all those who were complicit in it.Opponents accused her of
making the Jews complicit in their fate. She rejected that outright – “Nowhere
in this book did I accuse the Jews of failing to resist” – but said, “that the
tone is predominantly ironic is completely true. [Reading Eichmann’s trial] I
laughed countless times, I laughed out loud. I’d probably still laugh
three minutes before my certain death.”

This is the book that
coined the phrase “banality of evil”, which has ramifications for both
totalitarianism as a project and the pathways of resistance. But it is also a
useful thumbnail of the primacy of language to her understanding of politics;
cliches in the service of control, their mundanity, their mendacity, cannot but
amuse her. There is also the matter of Martin Heidegger, the philosopher with
whom she had a turbulent relationship in the 20s, and some other contact – its
extent unclear – after the war,despite his links with the Nazi party,
even justifying them (it reads like the darkest imaginable romcom – “But I
love him! But he’s a Nazi. But I love him!”).

Pollock guards against
drawing too many of the obvious parallels between The Origins of Totalitarianism
and the US’s situation today: “Islamophobia is not elaborated with the same
complexity of tropes and myths as antisemitism and one shouldn’t equate them.”
The work of Arendt’s that she refers to most often is the one that came
directly after Origins, 1958’sThe Human Condition. In the
Holocaust, “we have seen the abolition of the human,” Pollock explains, “and
then she has to write what would actually be an account of the human as a political
creature”. Arendt has two core beliefs about the human condition (not to be
confused with human nature). First, Pollock explains: “Every human life is
the potential beginning of something new. Unlike animals, which are predictable
– each will behave as its parents behaved – something has begun in a human that
could be completely different. This is ‘natality’. As a result of that, the
human condition is plural.” The consequences of this are vast: as we
communicate and use language, we show ourselves to one another in our
difference, and it’s in this disclosure that action is generated: we can do
something to change the world.

Then comes a really
important dichotomy, taking its roots from Greek philosophy: the difference
between this action and labour, which is what we do to survive. Work is the
economic, “which comes from the Greek wordoikos, which is
the household. But they imagined this other source, the political, the source
of speech and action.” This is what constituted, for the Greeks, the human, and
through Arendt’s prism, natality and plurality are the spurs of that political
self; that is, the political recognises the infinite potential of each human
life, while the economic recognises only that element of the human that works,
that produces. As Pollock says: “What she was afraid of was the tendency to
devalue action, for the economic to overtake the political.”

Taken to its logical end,
the economic overtaking the political results not in the extermination camp but
in the concentration camp; the difference is crucial, Pollock explains. The
concentration camp exists not to extinguish life but to extinguish the human.
“You are removed from moral action, you become a number and, finally, you are
reduced physiologically to a bundle of reactions, as the body struggles to
survive extreme emaciation.” If politics is only a set of economic decisions,
then the person is no more than the work they do and the infinite preciousness
of every person’s potential cascades into a brutal homogeneity, one person indivisible
from the next.

To put this in a modern
context, “official political reality is now being enacted by the modern
capitalist businessman”. Politics and economics are, in Trump, indivisible.
“And although it looks wonderful that people are demonstrating, it’s actually
rather frightening, because it’s generating a crisis situation in which,
ultimately, the protection of law and order justifies the government in extreme
measures. For some of us, it’s repeating the proto-fascist scenario.” It’s an
old Leninist stunt, the generation of civil unrest in order to attack civic
society. In that sense, we are all playing into Trump’s tiny hands.

Mark Davis, director of theBauman Institutein Leeds,
points us towards another text,On Violence(1970). “I think that gets
us closer to what’s going on at the moment,” he says. “She said in that book
that violence and power are actually opposites. When institutions, particularly
those of government, start to break down and lose their legitimacy, they lose
their power over the everyday conduct of citizens. So what they do as a
response to the loss of power is incite violence. Violence floods in to the
loss of power rather than being an expression of it.”

Pollock brings us back to
demonstrations and what they do to language, the slogan being a flattening out
of complexity, an echo of exactly the same one-idea pan-ideology of the
oversimplified worldview they protest against. I’m not sure. You can pack quite
a lot into a slogan – I particularly like:“First they came for the Muslims, and we said, not
today, motherfucker.”Yet I see the
sense of these arguments, and wonder, what would Hannah Arendt do? Would she
have marched on Downing Street? Davis is conflicted. “Certainly, I think there
is a lot to be gained from people gathering together to show solidarity. But in
a world where the institutions that we’re protesting in front of are losing
their legitimacy and their power, I’m not sure that this has the impact that it
once did. If we think of evil as this one person, this one big event, then we
tend to want to match that with one big display of resistance. But actually, if
evil is banal – a set of ordinary, mundane decisions day by day – then maybe we
have to start living differently day by day.”

I still see the point in
protesting as a concrete expression of solidarity. I’d take more, if under
attack, from a person who went outside than a person who signed a
petition. Tangentially, I have a sudden new faith in the feminist framing
of recent demonstrations as women’s marches, which does something to allay the
intimation of public violence that is always used as the justification of
suppression. It seems clear, nonetheless, that it isn’t enough: that perhaps
Arendt’s most profound legacy is in establishing that one has to consider
oneself political as part of the human condition. What are your political acts,
and what politics do they serve?

domingo, 12 de febrero de 2017

Think
of two significant trend lines in the world today. One is the
increasing ambition and activism of the two great revisionist powers,
Russia and China. The other is the declining confidence, capacity, and
will of the democratic world, and especially of the United States, to
maintain the dominant position it has held in the international system
since 1945. As those two lines move closer, as the declining will and
capacity of the United States and its allies to maintain the present
world order meet the increasing desire and capacity of the revisionist
powers to change it, we will reach the moment at which the existing
order collapses and the world descends into a phase of brutal anarchy,
as it has three times in the past two centuries. The cost of that
descent, in lives and treasure, in lost freedoms and lost hope, will be
staggering.

Americans
tend to take the fundamental stability of the international order for
granted, even while complaining about the burden the United States
carries in preserving that stability. History shows that world orders do
collapse, however, and when they do it is often unexpected, rapid, and
violent. The late 18th century was the high point of the Enlightenment
in Europe, before the continent fell suddenly into the abyss of the
Napoleonic Wars. In the first decade of the 20th century, the world’s
smartest minds predicted an end to great-power conflict as revolutions
in communication and transportation knit economies and people closer
together. The most devastating war in history came four years later. The
apparent calm of the postwar 1920s became the crisis-ridden 1930s and
then another world war. Where exactly we are in this classic scenario
today, how close the trend lines are to that intersection point is, as
always, impossible to know. Are we three years away from a global
crisis, or 15? That we are somewhere on that path, however, is
unmistakable.

Are we three years away from a global crisis, or 15?

And
while it is too soon to know what effect Donald Trump’s presidency will
have on these trends, early signs suggest that the new administration
is more likely to hasten us toward crisis than slow or reverse these
trends. The further accommodation of Russia can only embolden Vladimir
Putin, and the tough talk with China will likely lead Beijing to test
the new administration’s resolve militarily. Whether the president is
ready for such a confrontation is entirely unclear. For the moment, he
seems not to have thought much about the future ramifications of his
rhetoric and his actions.

China
and Russia are classic revisionist powers. Although both have never
enjoyed greater security from foreign powers than they do today—Russia
from its traditional enemies to the west, China from its traditional
enemy in the east—they are dissatisfied with the current global
configuration of power. Both seek to restore the hegemonic dominance
they once enjoyed in their respective regions. For China, that means
dominance of East Asia, with countries like Japan, South Korea, and the
nations of Southeast Asia both acquiescing to Beijing’s will and acting
in conformity with China’s strategic, economic, and political
preferences. That includes American influence withdrawn to the eastern
Pacific, behind the Hawaiian Islands. For Russia, it means hegemonic
influence in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which Moscow
has traditionally regarded as either part of its empire or part of its
sphere of influence. Both Beijing and Moscow seek to redress what they
regard as an unfair distribution of power, influence, and honor in the
U.S.-led postwar global order. As autocracies, both feel threatened by
the dominant democratic powers in the international system and by the
democracies on their borders. Both regard the United States as the
principal obstacle to their ambitions, and therefore both seek to weaken
the American-led international security order that stands in the way of
their achieving what they regard as their rightful destinies.

IT WAS GOOD WHILE IT LASTED

Until
fairly recently, Russia and China have faced considerable, almost
insuperable, obstacles in achieving their objectives. The chief obstacle
has been the power and coherence of the international order itself and
its principal promoter and defender. The American-led system of
political and military alliances, especially in the two critical regions
of Europe and East Asia, has presented China and Russia with what Dean
Acheson once referred to as “situations of strength”
that have required them to pursue their ambitions cautiously and, since
the end of the Cold War, to defer serious efforts to disrupt the
international system.

The
system has checked their ambitions in both positive and negative
ways. During the era of American primacy, China and Russia have
participated in and for the most part been beneficiaries of the open
international economic system the United States created and helps
sustain; so long as that system functions, they have had more to gain by
playing in it than by challenging and overturning it. The political and
strategic aspects of the order, however, have worked to their
detriment. The growth and vibrancy of democratic government in the two
decades following the collapse of Soviet communism posed a continual
threat to the ability of rulers in Beijing and Moscow to maintain
control, and since the end of the Cold War they have regarded every
advance of democratic institutions—especially the geographical advance
of liberal democracies close to their borders—as an existential threat.
That’s for good reason: Autocratic powers since the days of Klemens von
Metternich have always feared the contagion of liberalism. The mere
existence of democracies on their borders, the global free flow of
information they cannot control, the dangerous connection between free
market capitalism and political freedom—all pose a threat to rulers who
depend on keeping restive forces in their own countries in check.

The
continual challenge to the legitimacy of their rule posed by the
U.S.-supported democratic order has therefore naturally made them
hostile both to that order and to the United States. But, until
recently, a preponderance of domestic and international forces has
dissuaded them from confronting the order directly. Chinese rulers have
had to worry about what an unsuccessful confrontation with the United
States might do to their legitimacy at home. Even Putin has pushed only
against open doors, as in Syria, where the United States responded
passively to his probes. He has been more cautious when confronted by
even marginal U.S. and European opposition, as in Ukraine.

During
the era of American primacy, China and Russia have participated in and
for the most part been beneficiaries of the open international economic
system the United States created and helps sustain; so long as that
system functions, they have had more to gain by playing in it than by
challenging and overturning it.

The
greatest check on Chinese and Russian ambitions has been the military
and economic power of the United States and its allies in Europe and
Asia. China, although increasingly powerful, has had to contemplate
facing the combined military and economic strength of the world’s
superpower and some very formidable regional powers linked by alliance
or common strategic interest—including Japan, India, and South Korea, as
well as smaller but still potent nations like Vietnam and Australia.
Russia has had to face the United States and its NATO allies. When
united, these U.S.-led alliances present a daunting challenge to a
revisionist power that can call on few allies of its own for assistance.
Even were the Chinese to score an early victory in a conflict, such as
the military subjection of Taiwan or a naval battle in the South or East
China Sea, they would have to contend over time with the combined
industrial productive capacities of some of the world’s richest and most
technologically advanced nations and the likely cutoff of access to
foreign markets on which their own economy depends. A weaker Russia,
with its depleted population and oil- and gas-dependent economy, would
face an even greater challenge.

For
decades, the strong global position enjoyed by the United States and
its allies has discouraged any serious challenge. So long as the United
States was perceived as a dependable ally, Chinese and Russian leaders
feared that aggressive moves would backfire and possibly bring their
regimes down. This is what the political scientist William Wohlforth
once described as the inherent stability of the unipolar order:
As dissatisfied regional powers sought to challenge the status quo,
their alarmed neighbors turned to the distant American superpower to
contain their ambitions. And it worked. The United States stepped up,
and Russia and China largely backed down—or were preempted before acting
at all.

Faced
with these obstacles, the best option for the two revisionist great
powers has always been to hope for or, if possible, engineer a weakening
of the U.S.-supported world order from within, either by separating the
United States from its allies or by raising doubts about the U.S.
commitment and thereby encouraging would-be allies and partners to forgo
the strategic protection of the liberal world order and seek
accommodation with its challengers.

The
present system has therefore depended not only on American power but on
coherence and unity at the heart of the democratic world. The United
States has had to play its part as the principal guarantor of the order,
especially in the military and strategic realm, but the order’s
ideological and economic core—the democracies of Europe and East Asia
and the Pacific—has also had to remain relatively healthy and confident.

In
recent years, both pillars have been shaken. The democratic order has
weakened and fractured at its core. Difficult economic conditions, the
recrudescence of nationalism and tribalism, weak and uncertain political
leadership and unresponsive mainstream political parties, and a new era
of communications that seems to strengthen rather than weaken tribalism
have together produced a crisis of confidence not only in the
democracies but in what might be called the liberal enlightenment
project. That project elevated universal principles of individual rights
and common humanity over ethnic, racial, religious, national, or tribal
differences. It looked to a growing economic interdependence to create
common interests across boundaries and to the establishment of
international institutions to smooth differences and facilitate
cooperation among nations. Instead, the past decade has seen the rise of
tribalism and nationalism, an increasing focus on the Other in all
societies, and a loss of confidence in government, in the capitalist
system, and in democracy. We are witnessing the opposite of Francis
Fukuyama’s “end of history.” History is returning with a vengeance and
with it all the darker aspects of the human soul, including, for many,
the perennial human yearning for a strong leader to provide firm
guidance in a time of confusion and incoherence.

THE DARK AGES 2.0

This
crisis of the enlightenment project may have been inevitable, a
recurring phenomenon produced by inherent flaws in both capitalism and
democracy. In the 1930s, economic crisis and rising nationalism led many
to doubt whether either democracy or capitalism was preferable to
alternatives such as fascism and communism. And it is no coincidence
that the crisis of confidence in liberalism accompanied a simultaneous
breakdown of the strategic order. Then, the question was whether the
United States as the outside power would step in and save or remake an
order that Britain and France were no longer able or willing to sustain.
Now, the question is whether the United States is willing to continue
upholding the order that it created and which depends entirely on
American power or whether Americans are prepared to take the risk—if
they even understand the risk—of letting the order collapse into chaos
and conflict.

That
willingness has been in doubt for some time, well before the election
of Trump and even before the election of Barack Obama. Increasingly in
the quarter century after the end of the Cold War, Americans have been
wondering why they bear such an unusual and outsized responsibility for
preserving global order when their own interests are not always clearly
served—and when the United States seems to be making all the sacrifices
while others benefit. Few remember the reasons why the United States
took on this abnormal role after the calamitous two world wars of the
20th century.

The millennial generation born after the end of the Cold
War can hardly be expected to understand the lasting significance of the
political, economic, and security structures established after World
War II. Nor are they likely to learn much about it in high school and
college textbooks obsessed with noting the evils and follies of American
“imperialism.” Both the crises of the first half of the 20th century
and its solution in 1945 have been forgotten. As a consequence, the
American public’s patience with the difficulties and costs inherent in
playing that global role have worn thin. Whereas previous unsuccessful
and costly wars, in Korea in 1950 and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s,
and previous economic downturns, such as with the energy crisis and
crippling “stagflation” of the mid- to late 1970s, did not have the
effect of turning Americans against global involvement, the unsuccessful
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis of 2008 have.

Obama
pursued an ambivalent approach to global involvement, but his core
strategy was retrenchment. In his actions and his statements, he
critiqued and repudiated previous American strategy and reinforced a
national mood favoring a much less active role in the world and much
narrower definition of American interests. The Obama administration
responded to the George W. Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and
Afghanistan not by restoring American power and influence but by further
reducing them. Although the administration promised to “rebalance”
American foreign policy to Asia and the Pacific, in practice that meant
reducing global commitments and accommodating revisionist powers at the
expense of allies’ security.

The
administration’s early attempt to “reset” relations with Russia struck
the first blow to America’s reputation as a reliable ally. Coming just
after the Russian invasion of Georgia, it appeared to reward Moscow’s
aggression. The reset also came at the expense of U.S. allies in Central
Europe, as programs of military cooperation with Poland and the Czech
Republic were jettisoned to appease the Kremlin. This attempt at
accommodation, moreover, came just as Russian policy toward the West—not
to mention Putin’s repressive policies toward his own people—was
hardening. Far from eliciting better behavior by Russia, the reset
emboldened Putin to push harder. Then, in 2014, the West’s inadequate
response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea,
though better than the Bush administration’s anemic response to the
invasion of Georgia (Europe and the United States at least imposed
sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine), still indicated reluctance on
the part of the U.S. administration to force Russia back in its declared
sphere of interest. Obama, in fact, publicly acknowledged Russia’s
privileged position in Ukraine even as the United States and Europe
sought to protect that country’s sovereignty. In Syria, the
administration practically invited Russian intervention through
Washington’s passivity, and certainly did nothing to discourage it, thus
reinforcing the growing impression of an America in retreat across the
Middle East (an impression initially created by the unnecessary and
unwise withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq). Subsequent Russian
actions that increased the refugee flow from Syria into Europe also
brought no American response, despite the evident damage of those
refugee flows to European democratic institutions. The signal sent by
the Obama administration was that none of this was really America’s
problem.

In
East Asia, the Obama administration undermined its otherwise
commendable efforts to assert America’s continuing interest and
influence. The so-called “pivot” proved to be mostly rhetoric.
Inadequate overall defense spending precluded the necessary increases in
America’s regional military presence in a meaningful way, and the
administration allowed a critical economic component, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, to die in Congress, chiefly a victim of its own party’s
opposition. The pivot also suffered from the general perception of
American retreat and retrenchment, encouraged both by presidential
rhetoric and by administration policies, especially in the Middle East.
The premature, unnecessary, and strategically costly withdrawal of
American troops from Iraq, followed by the accommodating agreement with
Iran on its nuclear program, and then by the failure to hold the line on
threats to use force against Syria’s president, was noticed around the
world. Despite the Obama administration’s insistence that American
strategy should be geared toward Asia, U.S. allies have been left
wondering how reliable the U.S. commitment might be when facing the
challenge posed by China. The Obama administration erred in imagining
that it could retrench globally while reassuring allies in Asia that the
United States remained a reliable partner.

NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM

The
effect on the two great revisionist powers, meanwhile, has been to
encourage greater efforts at revision. In recent years, both powers have
been more active in challenging the order, and one reason has been the
growing perception that the United States is losing both the will and
the capacity to sustain it. The psychological and political effect of
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the United States, which has been to
weaken support for American global engagement across the board, has
provided an opening.

It
is a myth, prevalent among liberal democracies, that revisionist powers
can be pacified by acquiescence to their demands. American
retrenchment, by this logic, ought to reduce tensions and competition.
Unfortunately, the opposite is more often the case. The more secure
revisionist powers feel, the more ambitious they are in seeking to
change the system to their advantage because the resistance to change
appears to be lessening. Just look at both China and Russia: Never in
the past two centuries have they enjoyed greater security from external
attack than they do today. Yet both remain dissatisfied and have become
increasingly aggressive in pressing what they perceive to be their
growing advantage in a system where the United States no longer puts up
as much resistance as it used to.

The
two great powers have differed, so far, chiefly in their methods. China
has until now been the more careful, cautious, and patient of the two,
seeking influence primarily through its great economic clout and using
its growing military power chiefly as a source of deterrence and
regional intimidation. It has not resorted to the outright use of force
yet, although its actions in the South China Sea are military in nature,
with strategic objectives. And while Beijing has been wary of using
military force until now, it would be a mistake to assume it will
continue show such restraint in the future—possibly the near future.
Revisionist great powers with growing military capabilities invariably
make use of those capabilities when they believe the possible gains
outweigh the risks and costs. If the Chinese perceive America’s
commitment to its allies and its position in the region to be weakening,
or its capacity to make good on those commitments to be declining, then
they will be more inclined to attempt to use the power they are
acquiring in order to achieve their objectives. As the trend lines draw
closer, this is where the first crisis is likely to take place.

Russia
has been far more aggressive. It has invaded two neighboring
states—Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014—and in both cases hived off
significant portions of those two nations’ sovereign territory. Given
the intensity with which the United States and its allies would have
responded to such actions during the four decades of the Cold War, their
relative lack of a response must have sent quite a signal to the
Kremlin—and to others around the world. Moscow then followed by sending
substantial forces into Syria. It has used its dominance of European
energy markets as a weapon. It has used cyberwarfare against neighboring
states. It has engaged in extensive information warfare on a global
scale.

More
recently, the Russian government has deployed a weapon that the Chinese
either lack or have so far chosen not to deploy—the ability to
interfere directly in Western electoral processes, both to influence
their outcomes and more generally to discredit the democratic system.
Russia funds right-wing populist parties across Europe, including in France;
uses its media outlets to support favored candidates and attack others;
has disseminated “fake news” to influence voters, most recently in Italy’s referendum;
and has hacked private communications in order to embarrass those it
wishes to defeat. This past year, Russia for the first time employed
this powerful weapon against the United States, heavily interfering in
the American electoral process.

Although
Russia, by any measure, is the weaker of the two great powers, it has
so far had more success than China in accomplishing its objective of
dividing and disrupting the West.

Although
Russia, by any measure, is the weaker of the two great powers, it has
so far had more success than China in accomplishing its objective of
dividing and disrupting the West. Its interference in Western democratic
political systems, its information warfare, and its role in creating
increased refugee flows from Syria into Europe have all contributed to
the sapping of Europeans’ confidence in their political systems and
established political parties. Its military intervention in Syria,
contrasted with American passivity, has exacerbated existing doubts
about American staying power in the region. Beijing, until recently, has
succeeded mostly in driving American allies closer to the United States
out of concern for growing Chinese power—but that could change quickly,
especially if the United States continues on its present trajectory.
There are signs that regional powers are already recalculating: East
Asian countries are contemplating regional trade agreements that need
not include the United States or, in the case of the Philippines, are
actively courting China, while a number of nations in Eastern and
Central Europe are moving closer to Russia, both strategically and
ideologically. We could soon face a situation where both great
revisionist powers are acting aggressively, including by military means,
posing extreme challenges to American and global security in two
regions at once.

THE DISPENSABLE NATION

All
this comes as Americans continue to signal their reluctance to uphold
the world order they created after World War II. Donald Trump was not
the only major political figure in this past election season to call for
a much narrower definition of American interests and a lessening of the
burdens of American global leadership. President Obama and Bernie
Sanders both expressed a version of “America First.” The candidate who
spoke often of America’s “indispensable” global role lost, and even
Hillary Clinton felt compelled to jettison her earlier support for the
Trans-Pacific Partnership. At the very least, there should be doubts
about the American public’s willingness to continue supporting the
international alliance structure, denying the revisionist powers their
desired spheres of influence and regional hegemony, and upholding
democratic and free market norms in the international system.

Coming
as it does at a time of growing great-power competition, this narrowing
definition of American interests will likely hasten a return to the
instability and clashes of previous eras. The weakness at the core of
the democratic world and the shedding by the United States of global
responsibilities have already encouraged a more aggressive revisionism
by the dissatisfied powers. That, in turn, has further sapped the
democratic world’s confidence and willingness to resist. History
suggests that this is a downward spiral from which it will be difficult
to recover, absent a rather dramatic shift of course by the United
States.

The
weakness at the core of the democratic world and the shedding by the
United States of global responsibilities have already encouraged a more
aggressive revisionism by the dissatisfied powers.

That
shift may come too late. It was in the 1920s, not the 1930s, that the
democratic powers made the most important and ultimately fatal
decisions. Americans’ disillusionment after World War I led them to
reject playing a strategic role in preserving the peace in Europe and
Asia, even though America was the only nation powerful enough to play
that role. The withdrawal of the United States helped undermine the will
of Britain and France and encouraged Germany in Europe and Japan in
Asia to take increasingly aggressive actions to achieve regional
dominance. Most Americans were convinced that nothing that happened in
Europe or Asia could affect their security. It took World War II to
convince them that was a mistake. The “return to normalcy”
of the 1920 election seemed safe and innocent at the time, but the
essentially selfish policies pursued by the world’s strongest power in
the following decade helped set the stage for the calamities of the
1930s. By the time the crises began to erupt, it was already too late to
avoid paying the high price of global conflict.

In
such times, it has always been tempting to believe that geopolitical
competition can be solved through efforts at cooperation and
accommodation. The idea, recently proposed by
Niall Ferguson, that the world can be ruled jointly by the United
States, Russia, and China is not a new one. Such condominiums have been
proposed and attempted in every era when the dominant power or powers in
the international system sought to fend off challenges from the
dissatisfied revisionist powers. It has rarely worked. Revisionist great
powers are not easy to satisfy short of complete capitulation. Their
sphere of influence is never quite large enough to satisfy their pride
or their expanding need for security. In fact, their very expansion
creates insecurity, by frightening neighbors and leading them to band
together against the rising power. Thesatiated powerthat
Otto von Bismarck spoke of is rare. The German leaders who succeeded
him were not satisfied even with being the strongest power in Europe. In
their efforts to grow still stronger, they produced coalitions against
them, making their fear of “encirclement” a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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GIVE ‘EM AN INCH, THEY’LL TAKE A MILE

This
is a common trait of rising powers—their actions produce the very
insecurity they claim to want to redress. They harbor grievances against
the existing order (both Germany and Japan considered themselves the
“have-not” nations), but their grievances cannot be satisfied so long as
the existing order remains in place. Marginal concession is not enough,
but the powers upholding the existing order will not make more than
marginal concessions unless they are compelled to by superior strength.
Japan, the aggrieved “have-not” nation of the 1930s, did not satisfy
itself by taking Manchuria in 1931. Germany, the aggrieved victim of
Versailles, did not satisfy itself by bringing the Germans of the
Sudetenland back into the fold. They demanded much more, and they could
not persuade the democratic powers to give them what they wanted without
resorting to war.

Granting
the revisionist powers spheres of influence is not a recipe for peace
and tranquility but rather an invitation to inevitable conflict.

Granting
the revisionist powers spheres of influence is not a recipe for peace
and tranquility but rather an invitation to inevitable
conflict. Russia’s historical sphere of influence does not end in
Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine. It extends to the Baltic States, to the
Balkans, and to the heart of Central Europe. And within Russia’s
traditional sphere of influence, other nations do not enjoy autonomy or
even sovereignty. There was no independent Poland under the Russian
Empire nor under the Soviet Union. For China to gain its desired sphere
of influence in East Asia will mean that, when it chooses, it can close
the region off to the United States—not only militarily but politically
and economically, too.

China
will, of course, inevitably exercise great sway in its own region, as
will Russia. The United States cannot and should not prevent China from
being an economic powerhouse. Nor should it wish for the collapse of
Russia. The United States should even welcome competition of a certain
kind. Great powers compete across multiple planes—economic, ideological,
and political, as well as military. Competition in most spheres is
necessary and even healthy. Within the liberal order, China can compete
economically and successfully with the United States; Russia can thrive
in the international economic order upheld by the democratic system,
even if it is not itself democratic.

But
military and strategic competition is different. The security situation
undergirds everything else. It remains true today as it has since World
War II that only the United States has the capacity and the unique
geographical advantages to provide global security and relative
stability. There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without
the United States. And while we can talk about “soft power” and “smart
power,” they have been and always will be of limited value when
confronting raw military power. Despite all of the loose talk of
American decline, it is in the military realm where U.S. advantages
remain clearest. Even in other great powers’ backyards, the United
States retains the capacity, along with its powerful allies, to deter
challenges to the security order. But without a U.S. willingness to
maintain the balance in far-flung regions of the world, the system will
buckle under the unrestrained military competition of regional powers.
Part of that willingness entails defense spending commensurate with
America’s continuing global role.

For
the United States to accept a return to spheres of influence would not
calm the international waters. It would merely return the world to the
condition it was in at the end of the 19th century, with competing great
powers clashing over inevitably intersecting and overlapping spheres.
These unsettled, disordered conditions produced the fertile ground for
the two destructive world wars of the first half of the 20th century.
The collapse of the British-dominated world order on the oceans, the
disruption of the uneasy balance of power on the European continent as a
powerful unified Germany took shape, and the rise of Japanese power in
East Asia all contributed to a highly competitive international
environment in which dissatisfied great powers took the opportunity to
pursue their ambitions in the absence of any power or group of powers to
unite in checking them. The result was an unprecedented global calamity
and death on an epic scale. It has been the great accomplishment of the
U.S.-led world order in the 70 years since the end of World War II that
this kind of competition has been held in check and great power
conflicts have been avoided. It will be more than a shame if Americans
were to destroy what they created—and not because it was no longer
possible to sustain but simply because they chose to stop trying.